Blog | Nixplay

That special time of year is upon us once again, when families gather together to celebrate love, spend quality time with each other, eat delicious meals and…take lots and lots of photos together.

If there’s one season when even the most reluctant photographers among us pull out our smartphones and snap a few images, it’s during the holidays. There’s something so special about seeing everyone together, especially if you have family members who live far away.

To make sure you get the best pictures from this special time, here are some tips for making your holiday photos even better.

1. Start out with some standard poses to get everyone comfortable.

Whether it’s a professional photographer or you behind the camera, one of the best ways to get a good portrait of your family is to start with some standard poses.

You know the type: everyone bunches together or puts their arms around each other, and smiles on the count of three. These could very well end up being boring photos – in fact, they probably will be – but there’s a good reason to include them.

Most people feel a little insecure when they’re being photographed, and it can take a couple of minutes to loosen them up. By starting with poses that everyone expects, you give your subjects a moment to get cozy together and start talking and laughing, which is when you’ll get the really good shots.

One last note: make sure to take lots of photos to up your chances of having at least one great shot of everyone.

2. Allow for movement and playfulness.

Portraits don’t have to be posed. Especially when you’ve got kids in the family that you want to photograph, a candid portrait often says a lot more than one where everyone’s looking at the camera.

After you’ve shot the standard posed portrait, keep your camera handy while your family mills around on their way back to whatever it is they were doing. This can be a wonderful way to get some candid shots.

Another good tip is to ask the family members you’re photographing to do something together before you start shooting. Have the parents sit down and play with the kids, or ask your siblings to have a conversation with each other. As your subjects forget about the camera, you’ll see them relax back into themselves – and that’s an important element of any good photo.

3. Look for emotion, rather than perfection.

This tip comes from Babble contributor and photographer Me Ra Koh, who photographs families all across the country. When you’re taking holiday family photos, what you’re trying to capture is the warmth and love that are present. You don’t need a perfect composition, or even perfect focus, to do that.

When deciding which shots to keep, pay careful attention to any photos that show who your family really is, even if the shots feature some imperfections. If you can feel the love shining out at you, that photo is a keeper.

4. Photograph from a kid’s eye view.

The stars of holiday photos are almost always the kids. After all, the joy that appears on their faces as they decorate cookies, open presents, or play with friends and family is a beautiful, magical thing.

To really capture their perspective, get down on the floor and shoot from their eye level. You’ll find that you get pictures that are not only more intimate, but also more interesting.

Of course, all the family holiday photos in the world won’t do you much good if you don’t have a way to display them. A Nixplay Iris digital WiFi frame will let you show off as many photos as you like – you can even send them directly to the frame from your smartphone by using the Nixplay app.

Browse our Nixplay Iris colors, as well as our other digital frames, in the Nixplay Store.

Less than a generation ago, parents would spend hours compiling physical photographs of their families into thick photo albums. Depending on how crafty a mom or dad was, the album might be painstakingly organized and annotated, with notes dating every image – or, at the other extreme, a collection of random images jumbled together that you needed a guide (like mom or dad) to explain.

But these albums are gradually becoming a thing of the past. Like so much of the rest of our lives nowadays, our photographs mainly live online or on our various devices.

This has led to an issue that’s become common among everyone from college kids to grandparents: an overabundance of pictures.

When you’ve got a smartphone with a camera on you from morning till night, taking a photo is almost too easy. Parents have literally thousands of pictures of their children; frequent travelers have endless strings of photos from their trips; and grandparents find themselves bombarded with photos of their grandkids via email, text, and social media.

How do we navigate this new digital landscape without drowning in our own pictures?

Digital tools to preserve digital photos

As digital photography has become better, easier, and more popular, all kinds of tools have popped up to help people organize their images.

Online photo hosting sites let you get your pictures off your camera or laptop and into the cloud, organized into virtual albums.

Digital wi-fi cloud frames like the Nixplay Iris and the Nixplay Seed let you organize and display your images in playlists. You can even send pictures to the frame from anywhere in the world.

But this could be just the beginning of how our own photographic preservation techniques are changing, according to the NPR article “In the Digital Age, the Family Photo Album Fades Away. While many of us may still feel nostalgic for physical family photo albums, it’s likely that our children won’t have that same association.

They will have lived their entire lives in the digital age, when taking a picture means snapping a photo on a smartphone and being able to see it or share it immediately afterward. They’re used to scrolling through virtual albums on hard drives, phones, and social media sites. For them, a “family album” is more likely to be a hard drive that gets pulled out at holiday gatherings, or passed down from grandparents.

The NPR article quotes Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information on the way generational preferences and technology are changing the way we archive our pictures.

According to Lynch, children today will likely expect to be able to watch themselves grow up through digital albums and online. Physical photo books may document specific events, like a baby’s first year or a college graduation; however, the sheer volume of images that we all have now will make the kind of family albums that we held on to in the past impractical.

Becoming your own personal photo archivist

Admittedly, keeping track of your digital photos can be a lot harder than throwing all your hard copy photos into a shoebox.

This is because we split our pictures up onto so many devices, and so many platforms – you may have pictures on your phone, your Facebook and Instagram accounts, a cloud service like Google Drive, and a computer, just to name a few.

The first step, then, is to put all these photos together. The best way to do this is to use two external hard drives, one as an original and the other as a copy that you store with a family member or in another safe place away from your house. This way, you won’t lose all your pictures if disaster strikes your home.

Since you want to be able to actually see and enjoy your photos, too, a digital frame can be a perfect counterpart to your photo hard drive. With the Nixplay app, you can create photo playlists to serve as mini-albums.

There are all kinds of approaches you can take. If you have kids, consider creating a special playlist for each child, as a kind of digital baby book.

If you’re an avid traveler, divide your playlists up by trip, or by region of the world.

If you’re giving a digital frame as a gift, try creating playlists that document important moments you’ve spent together.

The family album may be slowly becoming a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean your photos are doomed to be hidden away on a hard drive forever. To find the Nixplay digital frame that fits your family, read our post “The Right Digital Frame for Every Type of Family.”

No matter how exotic the location or how beautiful the hotel room, business travel can be a lonely, stressful experience – especially if you’ve got family at home awaiting your return.

Taking your digital frame along can make your room feel a little more like home. So what pictures should you include? What playlists should you create to help you relax in the midst of your busy, jet-setting schedule?

1. Family. Obviously, the first playlist you need on your digital frame is one devoted to your family. Images of your spouse or significant other, your children, your pets – these photos will help you feel more connected to the ones you love while you’re away.

And since your family can send photos directly to your Nixplay WiFi cloud frame no matter where you may be, they could surprise you with new pictures every morning that you’re away.

2. Important milestones. Another good playlist to have on your digital frame is one of important milestones in your and your family’s life. Your wedding, the birth of a child, important birthdays and work events, and your child’s graduation are just a few ideas.

3. Soothing nature photos. When you’re waiting for a delayed flight in an airport, stuck on the tarmac in a plane, or getting ready in your hotel for a big presentation, it can help to have some beautiful photos of nature to gaze at.

You can find some of our favorite nature photos here, or find others around the web. Just make sure you adhere to all rules surrounding copyrighted images.

4. Travel photos. An ongoing playlist of images from some of your previous trips can give you a little dose of inspiration when you’re feeling jet-lagged or road-weary.

You could combine images from your vacations with some from your business travel, or create separate playlists – just make sure that looking at your business trip photos makes you feel happy and refreshed. If it doesn’t, you don’t need them on your frame.

5. Snapshots from home. Ask your friends and family to send you snapshots of their days to create a “real-time” playlist of regular moments in your loved ones’ lives. That could mean a silly selfie with the dog, a snapshot from your spouse’s run in the park that morning, or a photo of your child’s homework after school.

Whatever the snapshots may be, taken together they can give you a cozy picture of the people and places that you’re looking forward to coming home to.

6. The best meals you’ve had on trips you’ve taken. If you’re a foodie who likes searching out the best restaurants in every city you go to, chances are you have at least a few Instagrammable pictures of some beautifully plated meals.

Compile those together to create a kind of photographic culinary tour of your favorite destinations. You can also add to them during your travels, making this playlist a fun way to document the places you’ve been.

7. Cherished memories from your childhood or young adulthood. In case you start feeling nostalgic while you’re on the road, why not put together a playlist of images from some of your favorite childhood memories?

Looking at pictures from that summer at camp, your college freshman dorm room, or your first apartment can take you back to those carefree younger days and help relieve the stress of travel, boardrooms, and presentations.

8. Your travel wishlist. Even if you travel frequently, you no doubt have a wishlist of places you’d like to go that you haven’t visited yet. Or maybe, there are places you’d like to revisit when you’re not working, so you can spend more time taking in the sights.

Create a playlist of pictures from these places, and use it as a jumping-off point to start planning your next vacation – even if it’s just a daydream right now.

Digital frames like the Nixplay Seed or the Nixplay Iris can make a great addition to your business packing list, helping you to stay connected to the people you love and making the road feel a bit more like home. For more ways to connect with your family while traveling, read our post “Traveling for Work? 4 Ways to Stay Connected to Family in Style.”